


Something Lives Within the Wires

by zickt



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, the death warning is just for daniel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-19
Updated: 2018-07-19
Packaged: 2019-06-12 20:41:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15348297
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zickt/pseuds/zickt
Summary: The first little girl and the android she'd said she'd be with forever.





	Something Lives Within the Wires

Daniel is a footnote of history. He is nothing. He is a set-up. He’s got the questionable badge of being the first deviant to kill a man, (or at least get caught at it) and that’s what he’ll be remembered for.

It’s hard to tell where the deviation begins, exactly. It may begin the night he hears he will be replaced and picks up the gun, or maybe the 45th night Emma falls asleep leaning against his shoulder as they wait for her parents to get home, and he puts an arm around her shoulders and whispers that he loves her into her hair, with no prompting or orders or incentive or reason beyond the fact that it is true. Or maybe before that, as even the fact that they wait up is evidence that he’s managing to reorder directives, place what should be above all important [EMMA GOES TO BED AT 9:00 PM] below [EMMA WISHES THAT HER MOTHER WOULD KISS HER GOODNIGHT] but. But there’s no way to really know.

Perhaps the deviation begins when he begins to think with some venom about Emma’s parents, about how they’re never there, about how sad she gets when he is unable to distract her.

The advent of deviation seems tied to violence, people will muse years later, looking back, and they will not be wrong.

There is a moment where he yells at the android meant to talk him down and Emma screams and clutches his arm and the ragged edges of a thought flies through his mind.

WHY AM I DOING THIS?  
I’M MEANT TO HELP HER GROW

It’s discarded in the next second, like it was never there. 

Everything continues. He is lied to and he is shot, and he dies. Emma cries hysterical on the ground, a SWAT team member attempting to escort her away as gently as he can. The other android doesn’t spare her a passing glance, after her safety is assessed. It’s hours until she reunites with her mother, who hugs her and speaks with venom about “those plastic things”.

Emma mourns her father  
Secretly, she mourns Daniel too. She really did love him.

It takes her a while to get used to her new, human nanny afterwards. She doesn’t have the answer to every question instantly, and she can’t speak two-hundred languages. She’s got her own kids and she leaves after Emma goes to bed in the evening.

She doesn’t structure her life around making a little girl happy.

Maybe it’s better that way.

**Author's Note:**

> /jeb bush/ please clap


End file.
